SO reticent was Miss Manning in her lifetime, and so loyally have her wishes been obeyed by her kindred since her death, that when Mr. Nimmo last year re-published her beautiful memorial portrait, “The Household of Sir Thomas More,” it was clear that whatever of her personal history had ever been known had been already forgotten. She had indeed been confused, in a Biographical Dictionary, with another writer: it even needed the assurance of her surviving niece to convince inquirers that she lived and died “O my soul, she beats her wings, And pants to fly away Up to immortal things In the heavenly day: Can such be meant for me?— Come and see, say the Saints. Saith Jesus: Come and see. Say the saints: His pleasures please us Before God and the Lamb. Come and taste My sweets, saith Jesus: Be with Me where I am.” The voice is that of Christina Rossetti, but it is the thought too of her who wrote “Cherry and Violet.” Miss Manning, as we read her life in her books, walks through the world with an unbounded charity and a hope ever refreshed. “Preach peace to all,” said S. Francis of Assisi, “for often those whom you think to be the children of the devil are those whom you will know some day to be the sons of God.” Miss Manning loved to think of, and to look upon, whatsoever things are lovely and of good report, and so thinking and looking she found flowers “Tread softly! all the earth is holy ground. It may be, could we look with seeing eyes, This spot we stand on is a Paradise Where dead have come to life and lost been found, Where faith has triumphed, martyrdom been crowned, Where fools have foiled the wisdom of the wise; From this same spot the dust of saints may rise, And the King’s prisoners come to light unbound.” So when she turns to the sixteenth century, with its sordid materialism and its coarse handling of things most sacred, not merely does she recognise, as an Englishwoman, the grandeur of its struggles, but she sees its best embodiment in the tragedy of an almost perfect life. As she seeks refuge in that time of stress with the Household of Sir Thomas More, so in the next century she turns aside from the pettiness of Pepys or the realism of Defoe to the life of a simple girl born “Quali colombe dal disio chiamante Con l’ali aperte e ferme al dolce nido Volan per l’aer dal voler portate.” With “The Household of Sir Thomas More” we walked in the dangerous days when the Lion found his strength. With “Cherry and Violet” we are in the still more alarming atmosphere of the Commonwealth and the Restoration. Year by year, as old houses open their chests, and scholars hunt among their yellow papers, we learn more of the reign of terror which marked the closing years of the Protectorate. We see one Verney living a “lude life” with “my lord Claypoll” and other “my lords” the kindred of the Protector; while another, the honest Sir Ralph, stoutest of Parliamentarians, is clapped in prison, no man And then there comes in Defoe with From sources such as these—from Pepys and Defoe, as well as from the more sober pages of the stately Evelyn, it is that Miss Manning takes much of the mise-en-scÈne of her “Tale of the Great Plague”; and we find, as historic evidence accumulates around us, how true her imaginary picture is. It was a happy thought which made the story begin on old London Bridge—happier still, readers will now think when they see Mr. Herbert Railton’s beautiful drawings. Something we learn of the stress of the time as we recall, with Mistress Cherry, the strange pageants which the bridge-dwellers watched from their windows. They saw the double Among such surroundings we picture Cherry doing her simple duties, tending her mother, thinking somewhat primly of her vivacious neighbour Violet, fancying she has lost her heart for ever to poor Mark, and then waking to a heroine’s work in the horrors of the Plague, and finding through that her own bright reward. “The Plague growing on us,” says Pepys, and of remedies “some saying one thing, and some another.” So it begins in May, and by the first week of June, “much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw.” Ten days later, and as he And soon, “But, Lord! how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people and very few upon the ’Change. Jealous of every door that one sees shut up, lest it should be the Plague; and about us two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up.” Reports are terrible of the thousands who every week are carried to their graves in the long pits; and with an even closer terror speaks the record of the veracious diarist. “I went forth and walked towards Moorfields (August 30th) To these records the genius of Defoe adds an immortal picture. “As this puts me upon mentioning my walking the Streets and Fields”—he has been speaking of the numbers that fled to the outskirts of the town, “into the Fields and Woods, and into secret uncouth Places, almost anywhere to creep into a Bush, or Hedge, and die,” and how it “was a general “It is true, when the Infection came to such a Height as I have now mentioned, there were very few Physicians which car’d to stir abroad to sick Houses, and very many of the most eminent of “One of the worst Days we had in the whole Time, as I thought, was in the Beginning of September, when indeed good People began to think that God was resolved to make a full End of the People in this miserable City. This was at that Time when the Plague was fully come into the Eastern Parishes: the Parish of Algate, if I may give my Opinion, buried above a thousand a Week for two Weeks, though the Bills did not say so many; but it surrounded me at so dismal a rate, that there was not a House in twenty uninfected; in the Minories, in Houndsditch, and in those Parts of There is little, if anything, in the description which is exaggerated. How much in tone as well as detail Miss Manning learnt from this great master of fiction is clear. But it was altogether foreign to her nature to paint long in such gloomy colours, and she turned, with a true art, from the horrors of the So she brings her heroine down into Berkshire. A very short journey we take it to have been, or the old horse must have been more swift of foot than we should gather from Mistress Cherry’s description, for Buckland in Berks lies not far from Faringdon, and over seventy miles from London town. One of those quiet little villages it is that nestle among the low hills that overlook the peaceful valley of the upper Thames. A fine old church may have had Master Blower for its vicar. It has four bells and a register that date from his day. There are memorials of two families, the Yates and the Southbys, who have passed away with the good old times. The house is not such as Mistress Cherry stayed in, but speaks all of the eighteenth century, of George the Second and Mr. Wood of Bath. “This little stream whose hamlets scarce have names, This far-off, lonely mother of the Thames.” One may like to fancy her rejoicing in it, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti rejoiced, who lived in a quaint old house such as she had pictured Master Blower welcoming Cherry into, only a few miles away from Buckland, at Kelmscott. But the place refuses to be identified, and we must be content to conclude that Mistress Cherry’s geography was at fault. Having chosen a striking setting for her characters, Miss Manning knew well how to give them life. She had a quiet humour, and a kindly knowledge of human nature, which made her draw Whether most lads would not fall in love with Violet we cannot tell, but certainly quiet Cherry is a good woman, worthy of the hand of Mary Wilkins. And so we leave her and Master Blower happy in their home at Bucklands. Good man, we doubt not he tilled his garden and tended his parish well, like the Berkshire priest and poet of to-day, and, it may be, with the same thought. “In all my borders I my true love seek By flowery signs to set: Praising the rose-carnation for her cheek, Her hair the violet; Flowers that with sweet returns each season bloom, As each its impulse wakes, Making air fragrant with a purple gloom, Or whorl of crimson flakes. Carnation, foam of light; Be pledges of a beauty still more fair When hair and cheek are white.” All’s well that ends well. After prim Puritanism and roystering Restoration revels, after Plague and Fire, comes the quiet ending in the country’s peace. W. H. HUTTON. The Great House, Burford, June 26, 1896. CHERRY AND VIOLET CHERRY AND VIOLET |